Using Facebook beyond school

With the use of Facebook and other social networking sites being considered by many schools as a way to communicate with parents, students and others, I have tried to pull together some information based on user groups such as Safetynet on the best way to go about this. please feel free to add your thoughts and experiences to help others.

Using Facebook to keep parents up to date is a good idea but start by consulting with them, if they do not want it there is little point in setting it up

Putting information up for older pupils is fine as long as the information can be accessed in other ways e.g. Twitter, the schools website or learning platform for those not wishing to engage with Facebook. (There may be cultural/social/technical issues around this)

Using Facebook for directly informing or communicating with pupils under 13 should not be done, as this may be seen as encouraging them to use Facebook. I appreciate that you can view Facebook pages without logging on, but to like etc. you need to be logged in.

Putting information relevant to pupils under 13 for parental information and for parents to share with their children should be okay. In this way pupils may get reminders etc. by looking at the public page, but are not being told to use it. Think carefully about what you do put up in case it encourages students under 13 to join the site.

Administratively, it is better to only allow likes on posts, as this ensures you don’t need to moderate it 24/7 (also there is the being responsible for comments on your site issue).

A useful way of parents contacting the school could be through the messaging option, as long as this is checked regularly.

It would be prudent not to mention specifics when discussion trips etc., as there might be child protection issues around revealing where pupils are going and when, on a public site.

Ensure that at least two people have access to the facebook account at all times to ensure child protection when it comes to private messages etc. Possibly set up a new email address in our system to monitor this.

Ensure the site is kept active and up to date or it will become a a waste of time and fail to achive the impact you are looking for

Trips – If you are going to use this to feedback/update to parents about these activioties ensure that the school has good risk assessments in place for the actual trip and covers the use of social media.

If you plan to add pictures of pupils, ensure your policy is clear and up to date, and follow the usual advice such as not to use full names etc. Again, you will need parental consent for this.

There is still a problem with pictures (even without using names) in that they can be tagged. A good way of avoiding this is to have content of this sort appearing to be in Facebook whilst actually being hosted elsewhere and pulled in to sit inside Facebook – removing the functions that exist for all content hosted by Facebook.

Although this sounds like a strange place to start I hope I can make some sense of it. The reason for starting with Einstein is the quote he once made defining insanity and if you haven’t seen this it goes something like; ‘Insanity: doing the same thing over and over ... Continue reading →